On the heels of the successful Five Weeks to a Social Library and the Learning 2.0 from Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County with its 23 Things, we also have at least two examples of academic libraries organizing their own 2.0 events/series. Check out the Library 2.0 Conference at The Ohio State University Libraries, and Mlibrary2.0 and 13 Things from the University of Michigan Library. With access to all of this, making your own AcademicLibrary2.0 workshop series will be far less work than it otherwise would be. Don’t have money to bring in all the speakers? A big thank you to our colleagues for recording and making available so many of the sessions they have sponsored! Use the comments to tell us about your AcademicLibrary2.0 efforts!
Lisa – thank you so much for coming to speak at our event. We will benefit from your experiences at UIUC. You, Eli Neiburger and Jane Blumenthal did an excellent job presenting not only the things you’ve done, but effective reasoning for doing those new things.
I have never heard a convincing argument for libraries and librarians spending time and resources in Second Life — but it’s easy to understand why you and your staff have chosen to go forward with it with the reasoning you gave: 3D avatar-based environments like Second Life aren’t going to go away. While Second Life may or may not survive, and there may not be many people there right now, finding out how a library can operate in a world like that will prepare you for whatever the “big thing” actually ends up being in 3D worlds.
There are several people who blogged the event, or at least who posted reactions to it. Those blogs are all aggregated at http://www.lib.umich.edu/lib20/uberfeed.html if anyone out there in libraryland wants to read about the event Lisa, Eli and Jane spoke at (Gaming and Social Networking: A New Direction for Academic Libraries).
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And keep an eye out at the end of this year for the unique ACRL hybrid publication Library 2.0 Casebook for Academic Libraries and attendant wiki! This book is being edited by Laura Cohen at The University at Albany. Thanks, Lisa, for finding and sharing these other approaches!